I would gladly pay $15 for Old and New Testament

I like the SKJV gospel of John but would not pay for anything further

I dislike the SKJV gospel of John and am not interested in anything further

I am a publisher. In 2010 I published a new KJV version which is claimed to be more faithful to the Majority Manuscripts as represented by the TR than the NKJV. As it turns out the NKJV has 2000 variants or more in it that deviate from the TR because it is based on a New Greek Manuscript that Arthur Farstad compiled that included as its basis part of the Sinaiticus (Tischendorf) which is one of the Alexandrian Manuscripts that was also used by Westcott & Hort, UBS. For those that don't know this almost all the non KJV type bibles including the NKJV (Which is misleading) are no longer based on the same Greek text that the KJV was based on.

The second goal of the version we have published is the desire to make the archaisms of the KJV Bible more understandable to those that are learning English as a Second Language, mostly in third world and Asian countries. That is why we went with the word "Simplified".

I am releasing to your forum the Gospel of John as a sample of the version. I don't know that I have time right now to convert the whole New Testament to your forum as it took about 30 hours to convert this one gospel to the required format. I may give an update in 6 months to you of the whole New Testament when I get time to do the required work. (As a retired programmer I am considering writing a front end compiler to go in front of the supplied compiler to allow the format from a Word document to be converted to the requirements of the FORGE compiler that Brandon Supplies. That would speed up the possibility of adding some books for your use from our publishing company, including the SKJV itself.)

For now I would like to offer you the gospel of John. I value your comments regarding it. If you are interested in receiving a printed copy of the version or in donating 10 dollars toward its conversion effort for the SwordSearcher let me know by sending me a personal email. rayluff@rogers.com.

Attached Files:

Your revision appears to eliminate the distinction between first person plural and singular pronouns. Here is a list of verses where the distinction between plural (you/ye/etc) and singular (thee/thou/etc) not just removed but confused, since the text contains both singular and plural forms of the word:

Joh 1:38; 3:7,11; 8:19,25,33; 10:36; 14:9-10; 16:5

Actually now that I look at this again, it looks like you have some footnotes there on each of the singular forms. Two suggestions:

Dispense with the footnotes and restore the singular form (thee/thou/etc). They are not hard to understand and the inspired form of the words should be incorporated in the text, not replaced with forms of the words that cast confusion on the text and moved to footnotes.

If you choose to keep the edited form of the words you should use the footnote feature in Forge so that the footnotes appear in the margin area.

-Brandon
Author of SwordSearcher Bible Software

Ephesians 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God

I am glad you noticed that the subscripted (s) means singular. I am looking for a non keyboard character that might work for it. The decision was made by my review board that it was significant for a preacher to be able to make an interpretation of the singular form but that it could be a silent distinction in narrating text. I discussed this distinction with D.A.Waite and he liked the way we handled it. He prefers to teach the reader however to know the thees and thous. So I wouldn't say it was a full endorsement from him but it was a soft approval that at least the version addresses that concern.

The SKJV was developed as an attempt to quell the tide of missionaries diving to less worthy versions such as the NIV for use in foreign missions. We tried to answer their objections to a modern KJV. It was felt by this target audience that keeping thous and thys was enough reason to abandon the KJV or SKJV even if it is a more accurate version. It is difficult to do but we have tried to draw a line of TRUCE between KJV ONLY and NIV (Alexandrian) ONLY advocates. We find that many of the Alexandrian leaning advocates do not advocate for the underlying Greek choice they are making instead they appeal to the English comprehension arguments. They say give us a KJV variant that we can use that is as accurate as possible and reads in todays Natural Language not in anything that sounds ELIZABEETHEN. We walk a fine line with what we are doing knowing that we may be hated by the KJV ONLY camp and the NIV or other Alexandrian camp, no matter what we do. However interestingly we have many pastors who have come on board with us who feel this would heal some splits in Churches over this issue.

Regarding the tense. Yes I am well aware that for the most part the text was put into past tense as many other newer Bible versions does. The reason for this is that we don't speak in a manner that changes tenses in English naturally. Also the Greek has 8 tenses we don't have that many tenses. To some extent the KJV which tries to switch tenses does not fully represent the Greek either. In this regard the SKJV is not as accurate as the KJV I would agree. However it is better that the RV and the ASV that you allow as vesions to be downloaed with your product. It is better because it is faithful to the TR.

Also you didn't notice this but we were willing to change word orders in sentences in the SKJV to more closely match natural English word order wheras the KJV sticks with Greek word order more closely. There was a 70 year resistance to the introduction of the KJV initially by protestants who prefered this choice of English word order over Greek word order that had already been provided by the Geneva Bible. It was only as Geneva Bibles became unavailable that the majority of Protestants began to use the KJV many years after its initial introduction. Part of the appeal of other modern non TR Bibles is this switching of word order, however as you know many take more liberty than this and add paraphrasing in the name of Dynamic Equivalence or other justifications.

Regarding the bolded words. I would be okay with making it available as bolded or not bolded depending on which file you install. The reason for the bolding is 2x fold. One, is it is copied from the NEWBERRY KJV BIBLE (Now out of print). Two, It is meant to allow the reader to jump through the text to find the topic he is looking for without the need for section headings which your product does not give an option of section headings so this would be an alternative to that. Also lifted from NEWBERRY is the CAPITALIZED words that are meant as starting points for preachers to know the best place in the text to start their message. This predated Paragraph Bibles and it does not necessarily align with the paragraph distinctions made in todays Bibles. I find this an interesting feature. There are other annotations that I spared putting in this electronic version that I might include if I split the product into two (Annotated SKJV) or (Regular Reading SKJV)

I do respect these comments and they will be discussed by my review board. I would appreciated it if this version could be made public and that it might gather more comments from others at the forum. This is my first experiment with considering making the module available in a Bible Software engine. This is because I very much like the design of your product.

I took your advice about getting rid of the subscripts and using the comment feature in the margin for the (s) singular references

I would like to have a bold letter option however if possible.

; has boldletter +b/ -b/

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option.

I am attaching an update file for Gospel of John that most likely is not final yet. I have added words that are to be spoken with more emphasis as indicated in the Greek language but for which we have no direct English equivalent in this update.
ie

John 1 - 18 No man has seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, |He| has declared Him.”

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I would appreciate the boldletter for this version if it is possible.

Also I would make the version available both ways one with annotations and one without to your readers when the module is completed.

AGAIN CHANGE THE EXTENSION TO .SS5BIBLE and of course move file to the personal swordsearcher user modules directory.

I'll take this as a feature request, however, the Bible text engine in SwordSearcher simply doesn't support it. The only way is to force it with HTML but then your module will contain invalid search indexing. Bible text in SwordSearcher supports italics (with [] as described in the Forge documentation), footnotes, and red-letter. No other text formatting is currently supported.

-Brandon
Author of SwordSearcher Bible Software

Ephesians 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God

Could the bold words be made larger instead and still work with Forge?

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Same outcome -- you'd have to use unsupported html formatting inside of verse text and the search indexing will be wrong. SwordSearcher simply isn't meant to support html formatting inside of verse text and there are other features (plain text copy, etc) that would be affected by it as well.

The best option is to use plain text formatting in the verse text, with the supported italic and red and footnote tags as needed, and to create a separate commentary module that uses all of the fancy text formatting desired for presentation.

-Brandon
Author of SwordSearcher Bible Software

Ephesians 6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God

Send me an email and I will send you the actual ss5bible file. Perhaps that will help. Also to anyone reading this, I converted the gospel of Matthew this week and both gospels are available to anyone who emails me. I may stop at the four gospels as a freebie here until I guage there is enough interest. So email me if you are interested. Also I will not be offended if anyone emails me about why they are not interested.